its alright. thanks for trying to help..

At this point the best thing to do would be to run Ethereal on both boxes while they're only plugged into each other (cross-over only, none plugged into hub). That way you'll at least be able to see if they can find each other with ARP.

I'm highly suspicious that the boxes are not both on the same subnet, else there would be no problem. Either that or the wrong NIC is configured on Windows.

how would I check to make sure the NIC is configured right on windows?

Like I said above, you should see two sets of blinking lights in your system tray, one for each NIC. If you unplug the one that's plugged into the hub, you should get a red X through one of the sets of lights in the systray. The other one is the one plugged into the Linux box. Right click, go to Status, then click the Properties button, then scroll down to Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties and double click on it. Set it to "Use the following IP address:" and make sure the IP address is in the same network as the ethernet card on Linux (with the crossover). Make sure you have the Subnet mask set identical to what Linux has for the network card with the crossover. The default gateway is irrelevant (you can leave it blank, since the default gateway will be through your other NIC).

cool, I can ping the linux machine from the XP machine. so thats good news
but for some reason, I cant ping the XP from the linux.
so it only works one way
any ideas why?

Did you check the Internet Connection Firewall settings? Chances are XP might have it's firewall turned on for that interface and not allow ICMP echo requests.

Is there an error message on the Linux box when you try to ping Windows, or does it just time out?

same thing happens for me:

on linux (192.168.1.2) It can ping itself but can't ping the windows machine

on winxp (192.168.1.3) It can't ping itself but it can ping the linux machine

on winxp the firewall is completely shut off.

I'm speaking for myself but I believe we both have the same problem and when pinging the winxp machine.... the request times out.

I'm guessing its something with winxp but havnt been able to figure it out quite yet. I'll try the above suggestion when I get home and I'll let you know what happens or if I find anything else out.

That would be great, all though by the age of the thread i'd say the problem may have already been fixed, come in handy for someone else having a similiar problems.

ayeah... after posting, I looked at the date and realized how old this thread was

lol... yeah i've been known to do the same a few times myself, but i's good to have around for future reference anyway.

lol, I was somehow still subscribed to this thread eve after 2 years.
It was amusing to read over it, since I never did figure out how to fix that.. on the other hand two years passed and I've gotten a lot more acquainted with Linux, and am currently running Ubuntu.

Ths only light I can shed on the problem is that I have heard that xp sp2 has lots of issues with networking. I have heard from some people that once they upgraded from sp1 thats when problems started occurring.